The program where the design of almost every website and app is born today - in the browser, live, with everyone on the same canvas at once.
In practice it looks like this: I open a blank sheet in the browser, draw screen by screen - buttons, menus, forms - and connect them with lines to show what happens on a click. The result isn't a picture of a design, it's a working mockup. Anyone can click through it and feel the product before it's even been coded.
Before Figma, design moved by file. I'd make a screen in Photoshop (the older image-editing program, long used for design too), export it as an image and email it. The client would look at one version, I'd be working on another, and nobody knew which one was final. Figma lives in the cloud - one file, one truth, always an open link instead of a pile of attachments.
Designers use it, but so do programmers, who pull exact sizes and colors straight from the file, and product or marketing people, who leave comments on the screen without knowing how to draw a thing. It became a common language between people who otherwise speak completely different professional languages.
Figma is an independent company. Adobe, the owner of Photoshop, tried to buy it in 2022 for $20 billion, but the deal fell apart at the end of 2023 due to regulatory pressure in the EU and the UK - and Adobe paid Figma a billion-dollar breakup fee. With that money the company carried on alone, and in July 2025 it went public on the New York exchange.
This gets me fired up
I remember the years before Figma - files named something like 'final_v3_REALLY_FINAL.psd', emailed at two in the morning because the client wanted a 'small change'. Wasted time, mixed-up versions, nobody knowing what was approved.
Figma changed the habit of an entire team. Designer, programmer and client look at the same thing in real time instead of playing a game of broken telephone with images. So when I take on a new project at CODE, the first question is 'do you have a Figma link', not 'send me the files'.